deQuencher - A Live Sequencer

27 Aug 2009

deQuencher is a live sequencing tool. The idea behind it is that, instead of having separate and isolated layers for musical events, you have your sound generators and gates / triggers / parameter changes share the same canvas (and layer), and you interact with your “objects” on that canvas to express your musical ideas on time domain.

The program records your mouse gestures and then plays them back continuously, and your objects interact based on distance between each other. For now, there are 6 types of objects.

They are:

Synth (sound generators: parameter / trigger in, audio out),

Fx (effects units: audio in, audio out),

Parameter (sends parameters based on proximity: no input, parameter out),

Trigger (sends triggers when close enough to a synth / fx object: no input, trigger out)

Chaining Fx (effects units that can be chained between each other. audio in / audio out)

Freesound sampler (downloads samples from freesound based on the keyword you give, and allows you to use that sound in your improvisations realtime.)

Once you record your gesture, you have the ability to post-process recorded movement, you can move the object(add offset), you can scale the movement, you can also clip the playback from its end so that the object will jump back to its origin earlier. Also, proximity thresholds for objects can be set.

The program is an interface for SuperCollider, so it uses SC as its sound engine. Usage is quite easy but getting started with it is not so straightforward so be sure to check the docs and tutorial out before attempting to do something with it. Comments and suggestions are always welcome.

New version!

What’s new?

The current version is a complete rewrite of the application with C++ using the great openframeworks library. There are some new features like arbitrary chaining of Fx agents and freesound integration. Check the documentation and tutorial out to see what they are all about!

Old, processing based version:

I’m no longer hosting the old processing version’s documentation here. However if you are interested, you can download the whole package for the old version which includes the docs from here.

To see a video of deQuencher in action, you can look here:

This performance was made with the old processing version of dQ so not all of the functionality of the current version is used there.